June 5th, 2010

City Memory Visualization update

Sketch of geolocated tweets, manipulating the mesh surface below

Joining the project is Liangjie Xia, a programmer and media artist based in New York and a recent graduate from ITP.

The current project focus is on a data landscape comprised of geocoded social updates, forming narrative pathways according to themes (we are evaluating Twitter, Flickr and Foursquare as data sources). As they occur, updates add points to a basemap of Taipei, cumulatively changing the elevation of the landscape. Updates, represented as nodes, are selectable, and articulate the landscape based on other thematically related updates. Finally, we are exploring toggling between two views: the surface mesh outlined above, and a view exchanging the mesh for narrative pathways, represented by hairlines connecting nodes related by topic and time.

Below are a few early explorations that begin to depict the direction.

Concept diagram of thematically-related social updates on a basemap of Taipei